23 Nov. 45
Reichsbank therefore assumed to a very
great extent the responsibility to finance the rearmament in spite of
the inherent dangers to the currency. The justification thereof was
the necessity, which pushed all other considerations into the
background, to carry through the armament at once, out of nothing,
and furthermore under camouflage, which made a respect-commanding
foreign policy possible."
The Reichsbank directors, as experts on money, believed that a
point had been reached where greater production of armaments was no
longer possible. We say that was merely a judgment on the situation
and not a moral principle, for there was no opposition to Hitler's
policy of aggression. Doubts were ascertained only as to whether he
could finance that policy. Hitler's letter to Schacht on the occasion
of Schacht's departure from the Reichsbank, as contained in Document
EC-397, pays high tribute to Schacht's great efforts in furthering
the program of the Nazi conspirators. The Armed Forces by now had
enabled Hitler to take Austria and the Sudetenland. We say Schacht's
task up to that point had been well done. And to quote from Document
EC-397 in the words of Hitler in a letter which he wrote to the
Defendant Schacht, "Your name, above all, will always be
connected with the first epoch of the national rearmament."
Even though dismissed from the presidency of the Reichsbank,
Schacht was retained as a Minister without portfolio and special
confidential adviser to Hitler. The Defendant Funk stepped into
Schacht's position as President of the Reichsbank. And I ask at this
point that the Court might take judicial notice of the
Völkischer Beobachter of January 21, 1939. The Defendant Funk
was completely uninhibited by fears of inflation, for like
Göring, under whom he had served in the Four Year Plan, he
recognized no obstacles to the plan to attack Poland.
In Document 699-PS, in a letter from the Defendant Funk to
Hitler, written on August 25 of 1939, only a few days before the
attack on Poland, the Defendant Funk reported to Hitler that the
Reichsbank was prepared to withstand any disturbances of the
international currency and credit system occasioned by a large-scale
war. He said that he had secretly transferred all available funds of
the Reichsbank abroad into gold, and that Germany stood ready to meet
the financial and economic tasks which lay ahead.
And so it seems plain and clear from the writings, from the acts,
from the speeches of the Nazi conspirators themselves, that they did
in fact direct the whole of the German economy toward preparation for
aggressive war. To paraphrase the words that the Defendant
Göring once used, these conspirators gave the German